


sand of the hourglass

by xerampelinae



Series: pull the blackout curtains down [1]
Category: Voltron: Legendary Defender
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Implications of immortality, M/M, Marriage of Convenience, Post-Kerberos Mission, Pre-Kerberos Mission, playing fast and loose with canon
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-05-06
Updated: 2018-05-06
Packaged: 2019-05-03 04:18:14
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,923
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14560692
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/xerampelinae/pseuds/xerampelinae
Summary: Kerberos presents its own difficulties. Shiro’s been able to switch his emergency medical contact to Keith (and Keith to mark him, except he’s already there due to having been Keith’s mentor once upon a time) but anything beyond that is weighed down by traditional government-inspired bureaucracy.“I’ve read the handbooks and guidelines,” Shiro admits, “and short of marriage or adoption, there’s no way to alter everything. No way to get Keith cleared to attend the launch.”





	sand of the hourglass

I.

Shiro gets sick. Knock-down, unresponsive sick. Limited visitors sick.

When he wakes up, Shiro discovers that Keith has not been allowed to visit. That he’s been attending classes grimly but obediently.

“I didn’t know when you’d wake up,” Keith says, once the infirmary has run through enough of its checks to be satisfied for a time and agreed to pull Keith from his free period. “They didn’t know if you’d clear me or not. To visit.”

He’s quieter than Shiro has come to know him to be; when he looks, he can see the path of Keith’s hands through his hair. His skin is dry beyond Colorado’s usual effect, even considering the elevation--Keith is dehydrated--and drained in a way that suggests he may have missed a few meals as well. Then there’s the redness of his eyes.

“Oh,” Shiro says, stunned out of typical, easy speech patterns, then finally, “I can fix that.” 

-

“How bad was it?” Shiro asks eventually. He’s heard the numbers from the nurse in charge of his care, but that’s a removed sort of evaluation, clinical in nature and practice.

“They were going to call your grandma,” Keith says. “Your room has ‘Fall Risk’ on the outside even though they’re probably let you get up once you’ve done everything under observation at least once.”

“Um,” Shiro begins.

“They made me read and sign off on literature on not enabling you when you want to get up out of bed because you don’t want to involve a nurse in--in bowel movements,” Keith snaps, “and on aspirating food you’re not cleared for in case I sneak some in.”

Shiro blinks.

“ _Signed_ literature, Shiro,” Keith says.

-

“I know it’s not the same,” Keith says the next day, small-looking with the cadet’s jacket fastened properly, “but I spoke with your study groups about the material you missed. They’re keeping track of what you’re missing. They’re making study guides to help.”

“Keith--” Shiro says. 

“Just because you’ll start worrying as soon as you start feeling better,” Keith snaps, shoulders hitching defensively high. He looks small and worn and scared, but Shiro’s woken up already. He doesn’t understand.

“I just,” Shiro says. “Thank you, Keith.”

-

“At least it’s summer term,” Shiro says, when they’re spread the assembled study guides and notes across the surface of the hospital bed, bedside table, and even the window sill. He draws the line at using the floor, but they’re managing. “Fewer courses to cover.”

Keith nods with a grave expression as he puzzles out a diagram. There are fewer students as well; some return home to their families or take a summer internship with a lab if they’re on a more logistics-based track. Keith and Shiro don’t have those to consider. Keith’s father disappeared years ago and Shiro’s grandmother is frail and in the care of extended family that would not welcome his presence. 

Shiro sighs, thinking again of Keith’s visits. With Shiro’s return to consciousness, he can consent to visitors but the Garrison itself puts great effort into controlling the flow of visitors. Keith’s the only visitor to have made it through, and even that is a regular debate. But, Shiro thinks, at least it’s Keith. After two terms of their mentor-mentee relationship, the Garrison was satisfied with Shiro’s pacifying and moderating influence on Keith. Shiro, on the other hand, is happy to be Keith’s friend and to be able to help however Keith needs him to. He’s delighted that Keith cares to return the favor, and he laughs at that.

“What?” Keith says crossly.

“Nothing,” Shiro says, grinning. “Just--I don’t think this was what they were thinking when they put us in the program together. But it’s better.”

Some strange emotion hovers in Keith’s eyes for a moment before he ducks his head, smiling self-consciously. “Yeah,” he says. “It is.”

-

“Hey,” Weir from his Interstellar Health study group. “Glad to see you up and about again. Class isn’t the same without you.”

“Thanks,” Shiro says, grinning and trying to conceal the thread of low-grade worry for all the catch-up he still needs to do. Fatigue’s a lingering drain but he can’t sit still with so much towering before him. He’s been pretending not to notice Keith pretending not to watch and moderate the entirety of his recovery.

“Your buddy’s really intense, by the way,” Weir says. “It’s kinda intimidating.”

Shiro can only laugh at that.

II.

Kerberos presents its own difficulties. Shiro’s been able to switch his emergency medical contact to Keith (and Keith to mark him, except he’s already there due to having been Keith’s mentor once upon a time) but anything beyond that is weighed down by traditional government-inspired bureaucracy.

“I’ve read the handbooks and guidelines,” Shiro admits, “and short of marriage or adoption, there’s no way to alter everything. No way to get Keith cleared to attend the launch.”

Keith makes a deeply considering expression, stubborn and too early in solving this problem to consider conceding defeat. Shiro considers his mac and cheese rather bleakly for it being his confessed favorite meal.

“Why don’t you get married?” Matt Holt asks. He’s joined them at lunch as a way to introduce himself before they’re thrown into the thick of pre-launch training. Despite being in the same year as Shiro, he’s taken to calling him ‘Sir’ in deference to the accreditation that qualified Shiro as the mission’s official pilot; he’s technically an officer now, graduated but remaining at the Garrison for mission prep. Matt is ‘Matt’ on the basis that his father, who shares the same last name, is mission commander; technically, he could be called cadet, even far afield. Keith is ‘Keith’ on the basis he doesn’t particularly care. “That would solve all your problems: communications, contact...” 

It’s probably a joke but Shiro and Keith become immediately pensive in a new way.

“Oh my god,” Matt says. “You’re actually going to do it. That’s gay culture right there.”

“Matt,” Shiro says. “We’re astronauts. It’s science culture.”

-

“Do you want to do this?” Shiro asks gently, awkwardly. “I’d understand--”

“All I want is to fly by your side for the rest of my life,” Keith says, lonelier and softer than Shiro’s ever known him. They’ve known each other for three years now, are better and stronger influences on each other than the Garrison hoped. More than they themselves have known before. Keith had no one; Shiro, for all his bright and shining heart, had only shallow bonds connecting him to the rest of the world.

“Okay,” Shiro says, heart aching in a way that he can’t unpack. It’s a hard smile that Keith returns him, but oh, they’re trying.

-

Iverson’s condition for the marriage involves not telling anyone and that they marry before the mission line-up is officially announced. By now there’s plenty of press discussing who will be taking part in the launch, but nothing definitive has been released. The Garrison keeps a tight grasp on information, even if its cadets have had their own debates and comes to its own conclusions.

They marry quietly in a legal ceremony in a quiet courtyard at the Garrison, witnessed by a pair of nurses pulled from the nearby clinic and sworn to secrecy under Iverson’s watch. They take care of the rest of the paperwork in the same meeting and then it’s done.

-

They leave Matt to his family photos and conclusions at the launch and wander the platform nearby. Commander Holt and Shiro are in officer’s uniforms; Matt and Keith in cadet’s uniforms. Later they will switch into their EVA suits for take-off, but that will be later. Now is time for sharing time and making mementoes, whichever way the mission goes.

“I’ll come back,” Shiro says, as they stand shoulder to shoulder and look over the shuttle together.

Keith is quiet except for the gusty, orderly breathing derived from a meditative exercise Shiro taught him. “Fly the friendly,” he says finally, like an asshole, because they foolishly watched _Aliens_ the night before. They should have watched _The Fifth Element_ or something where the aliens are actually friendly. 

“Stay frosty,” Shiro says gravely, and they laugh together, shoulders brushing. They disappear down some steps, away from eyes and cameras. For now there’s only the Holts’, but eventually the media will descend. They share a single kiss, chaste and fond, the kind that doesn’t start a fire but banks it however long until it can be re-kindled. They haven’t talked about it, not really, even though they should. They’ve run out of time--there’s only enough for one last hug with forearms clasped and free arms encircling snugly before the Holts and Shiro retreat to prepare for the actual launch.

Keith fingers his dogtags--so new he halfway expects them to cut him sometimes, with his new name and family seal embossed, old tags tucked into Shiro’s meager personal item allotment on the shuttle--and dares to hope for the mission’s success.

III.

It’s a great, strange relief when Shiro wakes from the sedated sleep not in a field quarantine tent but in a shack. It’s a familiar shack, after all, with a familiar silhouette marked out in the nearby shadows. It’s Keith’s shack, and Keith himself.

Fingers of pre-dawn light creep through improvised curtains tacked to the wall. There is a familiar bundle of clothes on the side of the futon. Keith breathes quietly, sitting asleep against the wall. It puts both Shiro and the room’s access points in his line of sight, like he’s worried Shiro will disappear if he loses sight of him and that someone might come and take him away again.

Shiro watches Keith for a long moment before he sits up and disappears into the shack’s tiny bathroom.

“私は健康な時も,” he murmurs, remembering carefully-memorized vows, “そうでない時も.” [Even when I am healthy. Even when it is not so.]

-

“It’s good to have you back,” Keith says, hand on Shiro’s shoulder like the extension of a lifeline. Wanting more, but not pushing for it. Gentle and kind in a way that leaves Shiro aching with all that’s happened since the last time they really saw each other.

“It’s good to be back,” Shiro says.

IV.

The years unfold as they do: with blood and battle and critical, shattering discovery. It takes longer to realize than one might expect if time weren’t relative and none of their native increments of time translated directly. Shiro and Keith laugh over it sometime--if they could become accustomed to running calculations in Celsius and translate it to day to day activities as they had at the Garrison--then they should be able to adapt with the different time systems. 

They joke their way through a laundry list of reasons: poor sleep, one of Coran’s concoctions (designed for the first Paladins and their xenobiologically distinct digestive systems), aging and diminishing neural plasticity, Lance’s recent fumbled pass on their last planetary visit. They’re busy, too, always fighting. It makes sense that this is something that slips through the cracks as they communicate--Alteans age differently than humans, even without ten thousand years’ worth of cryo--and maybe it’s an element of being a Paladin that is new and unknown or, like the first Black Paladin’s identity, deliberately concealed as potentially distracting.

Keith notices it first, watching Shiro trim his hair back to preference so that he can clean up the back. Looks at his own nails as he thinks about how he’s too tired to cut his own hair, how he’s taken to looping it into a compact bun.

They’re adrift in a sea of unknowns, no matter their prior training or adaptations, however much they usually forget that. And Keith is watching Shiro, as he always does.

“Shiro,” he says. There are new scars that peek out from below his clothes, but no new lines of age. 

“How long has it been?” Keith asks, mind trying to run the numbers simultaneously and without a blank surface to diagram and problem-solve. “How long have we been Paladins?”

Shiro’s eyes are steady but distant as his own mind works. “Years,” he finally concludes. Time, hard to track, has unfurled before them without their notice.

Keith nods in agreement, looking at his hands. They’re strong, capable, have changed like the musculature of his body: enough change to conceal what did not. In some ways, it’s easier to look at each other to understand the way their aging has stagnated. In other ways it’s harder; after all, Keith and Shiro’s lives came together even before Voltron. There are new aches and scars to learn now and again, but really, Shiro at least pays enough attention to others that he should have noticed.

They gather Pidge, Lance, and Hunk first and brief them, get them started crunching numbers while they consider human physiology and aging. If they’re right--if this is related to the Lions, to quintessence, if this is another thing Allura has concealed for convenience’s sake, like the identity of the first Black Paladin--they’ll need the buffer of time to keep from responding like they did when Keith’s parentage became apparent. 

They can’t let this interfere with Voltron; the stakes are too high. Flexibility in Lion line-up means nothing if they cannot enact a stable synchronization. Trust is a foundation that they understand shaken and otherwise.

Lance bemoans whatever additional inches of height he may never gain. Pidge cheers the long-faithful sports bra that will not be grown out of. Hunk shrugs and returns to his calculations.

For now there are no worries about the families back home or in space. That will come when they have more answers.

“Do you regret your vows?” Shiro asks as the others descend into the Castle records. At the time they hadn’t been sure what was in Keith’s background--ironic considering all they’ve since discovered--and in the end Keith had chosen to repeat the traditional Japanese vows Shiro had chosen.

“I promised you my life,” Keith says, eyes gentler than Shiro might expect for the topic. He looks quietly, openly _fond_ and isn’t that a sucker punch? “Having buyer’s remorse?”

“Mm,” Shiro says teasingly. “Maybe I should be asking you that. Three times a widow and none of them took?”

“Unfortunately for you,” Keith says, smirking and sliding close enough for their knees to brush, “the American government lacks representation and legal authority outside of its jurisdiction. You’ll have to try harder to dissolve this union.”

“Guys?” Lance asks, and they realized abruptly that they are not as alone or as ignored as previously thought. They do not move to separate. “Don’t you have to be married to divorce?”

Then Pidge finishes her calculations and they have other things to think about.

-

Allura joins the search for answers. It took them a long time to discover how few their Paladin predecessors actually numbered, for how long Voltron has existed. Secrets like their stalled temporal spans are lost to living knowledge. Once they have exhausted the Castle’s resources, they will seek answers in Oriande. In the meantime, there are other questions.

“Did you get space married when we weren’t looking?” Lance demands, gasping dramatically. “Oh! The betrayal.”

“But they said Earth married?” Hunk says.

Shiro and Keith exchange amused glances. They hadn’t been actively concealing it, only continuing in the same mode they’d operated in at the Garrison.

“It was six months before the Kerberos launch,” Shiro says, laughing a little at the Paladins’ affronted expressions.

“Oh my god,” Lance shrieks. “Why--how did no one know about this??”

“It was one of the Garrison’s conditions,” Keith says.

“But you haven’t been at the Garrison for a long time,” Pidge says.

Keith shrugs. “There was enough chatter that I fucked my way through Shiro’s records before we were ever involved. Before we met, actually. There was no reason to draw further attention, especially having seen what was said when we actually met. And then the mission was lost.”

Pinned down by Shiro’s gaze, the Paladins tactfully and desperately restrain from broaching whatever incident led to Keith’s expulsion and subsequent desert exile.

“I can’t believe Iverson knew about something like this this whole time,” Hunk says after a lengthy pause.

“I imagine he tries not to think about it,” Keith says with a razor’s edge grin. “His life was less complex before we came along. Imagine how he feels about being the one to introduce us.”

This time it’s Pidge who speaks. “Oh my God.”

-

Talk of Keith or Shiro in their Garrison days would have put them in earthly terms, elemental in nature: careless, furious Keith, a forest fire or a whirlwind, with the way he flew, or steady, methodical Shiro, carrying the strength and steadiness of the tides. Anyone who knows them in the later years--after Kerberos, after they came to the Lions and became known to them, amidst the stars they’d chased for years--knows them as something celestial. 

Pidge and Matt debate terms; the closest they come to agreement on is binary stars, spinning together through the cosmos and changing not just the space around each other but also each other. 

“Oh,” Matt says, when Pidge brings up The Paladin Marriage Thing with implied capitals in the absence auditory color-coding. “I forgot about the time gay culture meant getting astronaut married.”

If anyone were to ask Keith, he would say that he’s none of those things elemental or celestial. Keith and Shiro have always understood one another. And that has always been all they need.

**Author's Note:**

> Title from lyrics from Fall Out Boy's "Immortals" ("I’ll be the watcher of the eternal flame/I’ll be the guard dog of all your favorite dreams/I am the sand in the bottom half of the hourglass") and "Bishop's Knife Trick" ("I'm sifting through sand, sand, sand, sand/Looking for pieces of broken hourglass/Trying to get it all back/Put it back together/As if the time had never passed")  
> I have lots of thoughts and feelings about Voltron and equalization of power imbalances but most of all Keith and Shiro's relationships so, here were some of them. Shout-out to genocideandgenesis, who kindly bounced ideas about those things with me yesterday.  
> Shiro and Keith's vows were taken from here: http://www.seiyaku.com/seiyaku/vows/japanese.html


End file.
